A town in south-east
England, about 20 miles from London along the
Bath Road or
Great Western Railway, at various times in the counties of
Buckinghamshire and
Berkshire.
In his poem 'Slough' the late poet laureate John Betjeman used the
town to epitomise many of the things he disliked about industrialised Britain in the 1930s: the poem begins "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough | It isn't fit for humans now."
Adolf Hitler may have been an admirer of Sir John's, as within a few years he sent German aircraft to bomb merry hell out of the whole country; but Slough, like England survived, unlike Mr Hitler.
Today Slough is one of the dozens of large towns that encircle London at a distance from which commuting by car or public transport is not excessively arduous. Slough still has a very large Trading Estate, home to many successful light industries, and spiritual home of the Mars Bar.
Although Slough itself is not over-endowed with interesting monuments (the medieval church of St Laurence's Church is probably the most notable site), living in Slough is made more agreeable by the proximity of many other places of historical interest, such as the nearby castle and vast parks of Windsor, the college and playing fields of Eton, also Burnham Beeches, Datchet, Runnymede, Stoke Poges (where the poet Gray wrote his famous Elegy).
Citizens of Slough ('Paludians', from Latin 'palus'), are needless to say, heartily sick of hearing Betjeman's poem, and inclined to wish that Sir John had picked instead on one of its equally charmless neighbours like Maidenhead, Uxbridge or Bracknell.